Are TSA officers targeting minorities at airports?
In interviews and internal complaints, officers from the Transportation Security Administration’s “behavior detection” program at Logan International Airport in Boston asserted that passengers who fit certain profiles — Hispanics traveling to Miami, for instance, or blacks wearing baseball caps backward — are much more likely to be stopped, searched and questioned for “suspicious” behavior.
“They just pull aside anyone who they don’t like the way they look — if they are black and have expensive clothes or jewelry, or if they are Hispanic,” said one white officer, who along with four others spoke with The New York Times on the condition of anonymity.
While the Obama administration has attacked the use of racial and ethnic profiling in Arizona and elsewhere, the claims by the Boston officers now put the agency and the administration in the awkward position of defending themselves against charges of profiling in a program billed as a model for airports nationwide.
The complaints from the Logan officers carry nationwide implications because Boston is the testing ground for an expanded use of behavioral detection methods at airports around the country.
While 161 airports already use behavioral officers to identify possible terrorist activity — a controversial tactic — the agency is considering expanding the use of what it says are more advanced tactics nationwide, with Boston’s program as a model.
At a meeting last month with T.S.A. officials, officers at Logan provided written complaints about profiling from 32 officers, some of whom wrote anonymously. Officers said managers’ demands for high numbers of stops, searches and criminal referrals had led co-workers to target minorities in the belief that those stops were more likely to yield drugs, outstanding arrest warrants or immigration problems.
The practice has become so prevalent, some officers said, that Massachusetts State Police officials have asked why minority members appear to make up an overwhelming number of the cases that the airport refers to them.
“The behavior detection program is no longer a behavior-based program, but it is a racial profiling program,” one officer wrote in an anonymous complaint obtained by The Times.
Officers in Boston acknowledged that they had no firm data on how frequently minority members were stopped. But based on their own observations, several officers estimated that they accounted for as many as 80 percent of passengers searched during certain shifts.
The officers identified nearly two dozen co-workers who they said consistently focused on stopping minority members in response to pressure from managers to meet certain threshold numbers for referrals to the State Police, federal immigration officials or other agencies.
The stops were seen as a way of padding the program’s numbers and demonstrating to Washington policy makers that the behavior program was producing results, several officers said.
Some Boston officers went to the American Civil Liberties Union with their complaints of profiling, and Sarah Wunsch, a lawyer in the group’s Boston office, interviewed eight officers.
“Selecting people based on race or ethnicity was a way of finding easy marks,” she said. “It was a notch in your belt.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/us/racial-profiling-at-boston-airport-officials-say.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/12/logan-airport-racial-profiling_n_1769648.html
Logan airport travelers see "profiling"practice as routine.
Many travelers at Logan said the news was less than shocking and merely reinforced their belief that screenings at the airport are largely based on race.
“It’s never seemed random to me,” said Steven Wellman, a computer programmer from Worcester who is black and flew into Logan Sunday, after a trip to visit family in Bermuda. “When I travel alone, I am pulled from the line every single time — every single time.”
King Downing, a black lawyer and civil rights activist who sued the Boston airport after he was illegally detained there in 2003, said he hopes increased attention will force changes.
“No one should be surprised, because it’s been going on for years, at airports and in other law enforcement situations, and there has been evidence of it for years,” said Downing, of New York, the director of the Human Rights-Racial Justice Center. “My first reaction was, ‘Finally; it’s about time.’ Now let’s see if we can do something about it. It’s been way too long.”
“I’m a little depressed,” said Jack McDevitt, director of the Institute on Race and Justice at Northeastern University, which documented widespread racial inequities in a 2004 study of traffic stops by Massachusetts police. “I had hoped that using behavioral cues could be race neutral. . . . It shows how hard it is to disentangle race.” http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/08/13/federal_investigation_launched_on_alleged_racial_profiling_at_logan_airport/
Mandatory class for TSA officers accused of profiling.
Transportation Security Administration officers who are in a behavioral detection program designed to spot terrorists at airports have been ordered to undergo special training after officers in Boston were accused of racially profiling passengers.
All officers at Boston Logan International Airport, where the profiling is said to have occurred, and managers of similar programs nationwide must attend a four-hour class on why racial profiling is not acceptable and why it is not an effective way to spot terrorists. The order was announced on Friday, in a written statement, by the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the T.S.A.
It said the class would include “a discussion on how terrorists in the United States do not match any racial or ethnic stereotype.”
Officers stationed at more than 100 airports will have to take an online “refresher course to reinforce that racial/ethnic profiling will not be tolerated,” the department said.
“T.S.A.’s behavior detection program is a critical part of our approach to securing travel, but profiling passengers on any basis is simply not tolerated,” the Homeland Security Department said. “Profiling is not only discriminatory, it is also an ineffective way to identify someone intent on doing harm. Officers are trained and audited to look for observable behaviors, and behaviors alone.”
Ms. Napolitano also directed Mr. Pistole to improve the agency’s collection of data related to the program and to work with the department’s civil rights consultant to review program procedures.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/us/mandatory-class-for-airport-officers-accused-of-profiling.html